Articles in the Family & Friends Category

We are five former Ms. magazine colleagues who have been having dinner together once a month for over 20 years. We like to try new places, which is a good thing, since I am not sure we would be welcome back to a restaurant after a visit. We generally sit there for three or four hours, order an assortment of appetizers, laugh uproariously — and pay with five credit cards!

Each brings her own kind of support, encouragement, empathy and humor to the table. We tease each other about the very traits we cherish. There is the Do-Gooder; the Fierce One; the Peacemaker; the Pragmatic Midwesterner and me (“the Terminally Modest One,” according to the Fierce One, whom I consulted). Collectively we are more than the sum of our parts.

I’ve started to write about Women At Woodstock East 2013 a dozen times – and stopped, because I can’t really talk about what I experienced without first talking about my friend Deb. And for the last month I haven’t been able to talk about Deb, even via a blog post.

Girlfriends Day is a great idea. It invites us to search for the words and gestures that can only begin to acknowledge the importance of our own precious “circle of trust.” Moreover, unlike the other designated days of honor, this one isn’t about one person; it is about the alchemy that binds women together.

I’m celebrating National Girlfriends Day, Thursday, Aug. 1 on Huff/Post50 with a new post: “GIRLFRIEND POWER – Your Post-Fifty Posse Can Change the World.” It will have a slide show featuring women friends, women and girls exercising their power, videos and popular quotes from my ebookYou Gotta Have Girlfriends. I believe that work and women working together are among the greatest gifts of the Women’s Movement. My years at Ms. magazine taught me that girlfriends give each other the courage to do things we could not have done alone.

I’ve been writing a lot about my own girlfriends lately in connection with my new e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-fifty Posse is Good for Your Health, and each time I sit down to describe my “circle of trust” I wonder what to do with my lifelong guyfriend Nick. Our friendship is as profound and historic as any I have with a woman, but it is also different.

As any woman who has lost her mother does, I think of her especially on Mother’s Day. In fact, I think I will always consider Mother’s Day her day, not mine. And when I think of her life, I also remember the gift of her peaceful death.

When she died at 94, I felt sad, of course, but also relieved after several years of slow decline during which no matter how I tried to give her what she needed, I was one degree of deterioration behind in caring for her. And I felt grateful — grateful to her for the loving and gracious way she took her slow leave, and very grateful to the hospice team that guided our last months together. Thanks to them, she died at home, smiling to the end.

Q: On the heels of your last book How We Love Now: Women Talk About Intimacy After Fifty, what compelled you to write this new book?

With each book about women of my generation – Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, Fifty Is the New Fifty, How We Love Now – I talked to more women, did more research, and learned more about the exciting new stage of life we are exploring. Every interview, no matter how wide-ranging, eventually got to the subject of girlfriends. “I couldn’t have done it without my girlfriends!” was the phrase I heard over and over again. I realized that I needed to write a book that focused on that life-enhancing subject. Hence, my just-out e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-Fifty Posse is Good for Your Health.

We are five former Ms. magazine colleagues who have been having dinner together once a month for over 20 years. We like to try new places, which is a good thing, since I am not sure we would be welcome back to a restaurant after a visit. We generally sit there for three or four hours, order an assortment of appetizers, laugh uproariously — and pay with five credit cards!

You Gotta Have Girlfriends is a traveling “circle of trust “- of love and support – on the Internet shared by my girlfriends. Join me to celebrate our post-fifty posses and ourselves on the blogs and websites of my pioneering girlfriends. — Suzanne

“Suzanne Levine takes us beyond the frontier of our own expectations and into a new and hope-filled stage of life.”
– Gloria Steinem